“Wait, shut up,” Sage said.
“Excuse me?”
“No, I can hear it, too,” Liam said.
“I don’twantto drink any fairies, but Sage asked you to shut up,” Lucian said, smirking.
I tried not to laugh. Lucian didn’t have much in the way of a sense of humor, but he enjoyed every minute of poking the fairies like that. Good for him.
“I can’t see her, but my familiar is talking to me for the first time. It’s not like the animals with Liam. She uses full sentences and Ithinkshe’s Irish. She said the one that none of them are allowed to speak about is back. Something about a geas? She said they are back, and they’ve made a friend. Oh. She just cursed me out for thinking she’s anythingbutIrish.”
“I feel that. I’ve stabbed people over that,” Liam said.
“So, that rules out Lucian. If no one can speak on this being, then it’s probably been removed from all your books. I didn’t know Vlad the Impaler wasreallya vampire, but I even heard those rumors as a human,” I said.
“It probably rules out Ivar, too,” Sage said. “My father thought even the Marvel movies with Norse gods were Satanic, so I didn’t get to watch them, but I know who Thor is.”
“It could be unrelated,” I pointed out. “It’s a completely different MO. There was no fight here. Star just disappeared without a trace. Lola had the shit beaten out of her.”
“If this person is so evil, they’d been erased, then whoever just became their bestie probably is, too. Star disappeared the way she did because she had magic and training. They couldn’t risk her getting away like Lola did and telling a bunch of trained fairies what they looked like. Lola was funsies.
“Look, sometimes bad people need to die. I don’t feel bad about it, but I don’t get all stabby in the moment because I’m enjoying it. There are some nutfucks out there pop a boner when they are hurting people. The person who disappeared Star is one nutfuck and the person who beat Lola is probably the nutfuck who befriended them. One could have just disappeared Lola like they did Star, but letting the other beat her first is like Christmas presents between psychos,” Liam said.
I mean, yeah, Liam was raised by criminals. He probably understood this much better than I did. Ivar had the size to beat a woman like that, but I didn’t really get a feeling from him that he did that kind of thing.
And speak of the devil. He just showed up toanothercrime scene.
It really didn’t look good that Ivar and his team were this close to a place where a fairy went missing. I could justfeelsomething bad happened here. My familiar hadn’t shown herself because I guess I hadn’t wooed her enough, but shedidhelp us. And if she was Irish, that was probably what pantheon I was from.
Everyone turned to stare at Ivar and his team. I wasn’t an idiot. These men had been named in the brutal attack on a woman and now a fairy was missing. They said they didn’t do it, but they had no proof. All we had were feelings we didn’t understand.
I also wasn’t dead. The rest of Ivar’s team deferred to him, so I didn’t even know their names, but they were all smoking hot. Honestly, Liam should have been a huge red flag, but I already knew he’d never hurt me. I’d probably have to tell him not to stab anyone who did, but he didn’t hurt people for no reason.
These guys? They might be pretty and they didn’t set off any bad feelings, but I didn’t know how my magic worked. I might only be able to sense that when someone was actively planning to do something evil.
One of the Unseelie, who was clearly the leader and didn’t seem much interested in giving us his name since we were associated with Lucian, stared at Ivar, but it wasn’t the same reaction he had to us.
And Ivar decided to go full himbo and start flirting with the Unseelie leader, who was clearly into it. Ivar was massive, but he was also kind of goofy and seemed really harmless right now.
Lucian was pissed. He threw up his hands.
“You know the girl who got beaten so badly, she would have had to drop out of the trials if I hadn’t given her my blood accused all three of these guys of doing it, right? Vlad was a violent psychopath and I’m not, so we could have ended up with a corrupt version of Thor. The other guys on his team don’t even speak.”
“Ari and I knew each other before we got kidnapped. He hasn’t spoken since he was six because of some trauma that is none of your business. We have our own way of communicating and I’ve been his voice since then.”
Ari was the original bear shifter. That left the other man who hadn’t spoken. He just glared at us.
“I’ve had aterriblemigraine since I got out of that pool. It hurts to even be alive. It would have been worse arguing with people who’d already made up their mind about us. We didn’t touch Lola.
“I didn’t even want her on our team. We were drawn together for some reason, so we were going to request each other. Lola crashed our table and wanted to join. We didn’t feel a pull to her like we did each other, but we said she could join us because she needed a team. We had nothing against her and she wasn’t making more work for us. We had no reason to hurt her.”
That was different from the story Lola told us. And looking at these guys, they’d probably spent ample time camping and hiking and didn’t need to rely on an influencer to survive out here.
“Someone is lying here,” I said. “You have every motivation to and Lola doesn’t. Still, if youdidn’tdo it, someone wants everyone to think you did. Maybe Lola didn’t escape. If vampires can mess with people’s minds, then some being who was so evil, they got erased might be able to as well. They might have let her go after they hurt her with alternative facts in her head about who did it to her.”
“I’m sorry, but that’s terrifying. Vampire compulsion eventually wears off. It depends on how old the vampire is as to how long it lasts. Vampires don’t use it if someone can be used as a witness against them. It’s not just that it’s a crime. They’ll eventually be able to ID their attacker.”
“I’ll protect you,” Ivar said, winking.
